Introduction

Vedic Astrology is a profoundly Philosophical Quantitative Study of ‘The Movement of Life’, in the field of our Individual Human Experience

While Vedic / Hindu astrology employs planetary positions to understand the dynamics of ‘the movement of life’; it has nothing to do with planetary motions per se, and certainly, it would be completely erroneous to hold that ‘the planets rule our lives’, when Isvara alone has dominion over them.

While Vedic / Hindu astronomy studied the motions of the celestial bodies, Vedic / Hindu astrology had nothing to do with the motions of the physical planets per se. From the point of view of Vedic/ Hindu astrology then, the object of its study is rather the ‘mysterious movement of life’, in the lives of individuals. As the Vedic society had a through and through spiritual out-look, this was naturally inherited by their astrology as well, which became one of the intellectual and spiritual pursuits in that ancient society.

According to those highly perceptive founding fathers, who were the Rishis [Sages]; throughout nature ‘all movement’, wherever it was observed in nature, had to only reflect the rhythms or ‘the moods of Isvara‘.

Thus for them, both the orderly movement of the planets as observed from this Earth station, as well as the rhythm of ‘the mysterious movement of life’ itself, on planet Earth – both had to be governed by the self-same changing ‘moods of Isvara’. One movement was found to be predictable, namely the movement of the planets, whereas the other movement of life, say in an individual’s life, seemed to be ‘mysterious’ and unpredictable.

Vedic astrology is an Isvara-centered system of learning [Jyotir Vidya], in which the foundational principle is that every life-event in the life of any individual, has to have a one to one mapping or correspondence with planetary positions on the natural zodiac. By calibrating the various life-events in a given individual’s life with the changing planetary positions on the zodiac, one begins to see, ‘the significance of the planetary positions’, within the context of a human life. Both movements are the same in the highest sense; in that they are reflective of the changing ‘moods’ or the rhythms of Isvara. This is the most important principle of ancient astrology, whether it belonged to China, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt or to the Vedic civilization.